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I love a sunburnt country,
a land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
of droughts and flooding rains.
This quote is the start of one verse of My Country, by Dorothy McKellar - a poem that I (and a number of my friends of the same age as me) had to memorise in Grade 3 or 4. The issue of droughts and floods in Australia is just as prevalent now as it was when MacKellar wrote her poem, with most Australians obsessing over not enough rain or too much rain, depending on where they live.
Melody in Cairns blogs about the recent rain in Far North Queensland which has caused serious flooding:
It has been raining here non-stop since this time yesterday. I'm not exaggerating either. It's true. Non-stop rain.
The Burdekin Dam, the largest water reserve in Queensland, which is in this corner of the country, is over flowing with over 1.86 million mega liters. Whilst most of Australia is on strict water restrictions and suffering from the worst drought on record, here in North Queensland we have had sooooo much rain over the past week, it doesn't seem fair.
Last year, Tropical Cylcone Larry destroyed the entire banana crop in Far North Queensland ,which meant that the price of bananas for the last year has been obscene (about $A15 per kilogram, which is about $US5.50 a pound). Finally, the price of bananas was back to normal ($A1.89 a kilogram) but reports on the news today indicate that farmers aren't able to get their crop to market due to the flood, so supply and demand will once again cause prices to skyrocket. Hard to believe that bananas can be considered a luxury item...
Beerli blogs about the recent flooding in South Australia:
Australia can be a land of extremes and surprises. If the photo of the two little boys splashing in the red, torrential Todd River has gone around the wrold, people will wonder what on earth is the matter with us. The are places where it doesn't rain for years and then when the rains come everyone and everything is so relieved and joyous. Some kids grow up and don't see rain and then it rains and the water is so magical no matter how much red earth is in it. It can be as it has been here...so dry, so dusty, so relentless and then the rains come and everyone is chirping. The birds get so excited. The domestic pets are so confused. The spiders are out, the snakes are away hiding and it's ...Australia. The drought, the fires and then the huge, humungous rains and you go from one extreme to the other.
Lucky-1has some photos of flooding at a farm where her sister lives.
And on the other end of the spectrum, we have the drought that is gripping large parts of Australia - every night during the weather section on the TV news, dam levels are reported with the percentage full level creeping ominously lower.
Sarah recently blogged about the worsening drought and feeding livestock:
...I engineered Take 2 of the mission to obtain feed for starving animals.
We finally met up in Windsor at around lunchtime on a day which may well be amongst the hottest for this summer. I had another trailer load of drought feed pellets and by the time we got to the farm the thermometer on the balcony said it was 42C. And frankly, it was cooler under the shade of the balcony than out in the paddock where we spent an hour shackling chains together in order to drag a cow out of the dam.
The water is so low now that it has exposed the clay...clay which is essential to making sure that a dam can hold water, but is a death trap when the water level drops low enough to expose it. It seems that some time between when I left on Wednesday and yesterday morning, she walked around to this section of exposed clay, got stuck in it, fell forward and drowned. No. It wasn't pretty. Nor was it an easy job pulling her 500kg body out of the glug.
Australia is a country of extremes, and to see some parts of the country deluged with rain whilst other parts are still bone dry can be heart breaking.
Contributing Editor Jules also blogs at Jetsetting Jules.
